Ralph Gardner Jr., a big fan of the dwarf planet, spends the flyby in the company of scientists

My hunch is that I’m far from alone in my affection for Pluto. Indeed, if you were to take a survey of our favorite planets, Pluto would rank closer to the top than the bottom, punching well above its size and weight.

There are various reasons for this, I suspect most of them rooted in the human psyche rather than in the empirical realms of astronomy.